Solus Project is adopting Flatpak to deliver 3rd party apps with less pain

Finally, the Solus Project has decided to adopt Flatpak packaging system to distribute 3rd party applications with less pain. This announcement was made by Ikey Doherty, Solus project founder through their official blog.

The Solus project was maintaining a separate system for providing 3rd party applications for a while. This system used to download binaries/source files from respective vendors and build/configure it in way compatible with Solus operating system. This system had a lot of limitations like less reliability, slow processing, and lack of automatic upgrade. It was a lot of pain to maintain such a system. This is the prime reason pointed out by Ikey to adopt another package distribution system.

When it was about to decide a better package distribution system, the project had choose between Flatpak and snap. Though snap is backed by Canonical, and has apparently faster development cycle, the Solus owner Ikey, decided to choose Flatpak, as some of the main concerns of the project such as distribution of Google Chrome is already addressed by Flatpak, it is less pain to integrate with existing Solus system.

Well, enough babbling from me. You get the picture, we’re going with Flatpak. It’s a great solution,
and in terms of the future, the most suitable route we can take. There is a responsive, engaging community,
and it ticks all the boxes for what we want.

Additionally, Flatpak supports AppStream, which Solus already makes use of, so it’s an instant fit
in terms of integration into our Software Center.